www.teleg raph.co.uk

A previously unheard recording of a Russian spacecraft attempting to beat NASA's Apollo 11 in 1969's race to the moon has been released.

www.independent.co.uk

A never-before-heard recording of the dramatic moment in which British boffins observed a Soviet attempt to scupper American victory in the race to the Moon has been made available to the public for the first time.

An even more astounding entry occurs just before the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, scheduled for 16 July. The Soviet space program was a beehive of activity. Russia intended to launch the second N1 lunar landing super-booster with a mystery payload; and a Luna Ye-8-5 robot lander, that was to recover lunar soil and return it to earth before Apollo 11. Yet Kamanin's diary entries suddenly stop on July 7, 1969. They don't resume until August 20, 1969, when the reader is blithely informed that Kamanin has returned after a '40 day vacation' (!) www.astronautix.com...

By the beginning of July 1969 the launch of Apollo 11 was imminent and all of the Soviet plans made the previous December to 'answer Apollo' had come to nought. The L1 project was called off after another launch failure in January. The first attempted N1 launch in February had seen the booster ascend into the sky, but fail after a control system malfunction led to all first stage engines being shut down at 68 seconds into the flight. Attempts to land a Lunokhod robot rover in January and a Luna soil return spacecraft in June were both thwarted by Proton booster failures.

The last chance was in July. Both an N1 super booster and a Luna robot soil return spacecraft were scheduled for their second launch attempts. The official version was that the payload of the N1 was an unmanned L1S spacecraft that would orbit the moon and return photographs to earth. But according to information published as early as 1974 by former intelligence analyst Peter James, what was intended was a manned mission. The launch of the L1S into low earth orbit would be followed by a manned Soyuz. The spacecraft would dock, a crew would transfer to the L1S, and then be sent to the moon. While the crew observed from lunar orbit, the separately-launched Luna robot would land on the moon's surface and then return lunar soil to the earth.
www.astronautix.com...

Originally posted by MattMulder


my imagination is 100% into this, i can't help thinking about Dimitri, dead in his spacesuit, the helmet covered with dust, somewhere on the moon, near the crash site. He would be the greatest unknow hero of space discovery.